John Kenneth Galbraith on Friedrich Hayek

“The [seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s] was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation — Nicky [Kaldor], Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.”

“Sixty-two years ago I spent a year in what is known at Harvard as the other Cambridge. It was then in the high pulse of the Keynesian Revolution. Economic discussion was constant, intense, but London also called; once a week I came up to seminars here at the London School of Economics. A major attraction was Friedrich von Hayek, the noted conservative, author of A Road to Serfdom, his widely read analysis of the disastrous but emerging welfare state. He, however, was only slightly heard. The two hours were given over, all but exclusively, to telling him he was wrong. I found myself in support of this correction; it was education by the rebuke of error. (I trust that will not be the tendency on this pleasant and, for me, nostalgic occasion.) Over the years I’ve often presented myself to ardent conservatives as a student of von Hayek; it has added in an agreeable way to their normal confusion.”